XI
Minythyia followed him down to the street silently. The overcar she’d had earlier was parked near the curb, once again, he noted, in a zone marked prohibited. He was somewhat surprised that she had no other guards with her.
“How’d you know where I was?” he said.
She chuckled, as though fondly, at him. “Where else could you be? You had no place else to go. I forgot it at first but then, after I left mother and the others, I recalled pointing Pat O’Gara’s building out to you.”
“I was a flat to come here,” he muttered. “You realize, obviously, that Citizeness O’Gara had nothing to do with it. I intruded on her. She knows nothing about me, nor why I’m on Amazonia.”
“Of course, Cutey,” Minythia yawned. She banged at the control levers of the little vehicle, brought them off the street and zoomed forward, pressing him back into the seat.
He was disgusted with himself. He had spent the last precious half hour batting his gums about non- essentials when he should have been desperately trying to figure out some manner in which he could have escaped this insane planet. Some manner in which he could have appropriated a space launch and got himself out to the UP Embassy.
Instead, here he was, recaptured by a slip of a girl—or so she appeared, when not in uniform. He looked over at her. It was the confounded uniform that made these women look so aggressive and truculent.
He said in nasty irritation, “Where’d you people ever come up with the idea that women made superior warriors to men?”
She looked at him from the side of her eyes, mockingly, as usual. “My dear husband, whoever contended that women make better warriors than men? Didn’t Heracles and Theseus and their Greeks clobber the original Hippolyte and her warriors? And Achilles, when he fought Penthesileia before the walls of Troy, did he have any trouble defeating her?” she leered. “And you know what the legends tell us he did to her afterwards. But anyway, no. I’d never claim that women made better warriors than men. Now soldiers are another thing.”
“What are you talking about?” he grumbled. They were driving into an area he hadn’t been in before. Probably to the palace, he decided. He wondered how far it was. He could vaguely remember this part of town from the map he had been shown, but he couldn’t remember where the palace was located. Confound it, where had the palace been on the chart that Sarpedon had shown them at the Octagon?
She was going on, even as she zipped up one street, down another, in a heart sinking display of a racing driver’s art.
“Back in the old days, the good old days, I suppose you’d call them, admittedly a man could take a woman. A 120 pound man, in a fight with a 120 pound woman, could mop the floor with her assuming equal, normal physical development and training. Man is capable of a peak power output about four times that of a woman his size. However…there’s an however, you must realize.”
“However,” he muttered disgustedly. He had few illusions of what was going to happen to him, once they had him under Scop again. They’d drain every bit of information he had in his brain, from childhood on. Every detail of the workings of Section G with which he was familiar, would be theirs to utilize. They’d get as complete a list of agents, and their secret whereabouts, that he, Ronny Bronston, could provide.
“However, a woman can endure a continuing strain longer than a man. How many men could bear up under a difficult childbirth? At any rate, back when warriors fought with swords, men had the ascendency. But it began to taper off, dear husband, when weapons began to change, when even the bayonet became antiquated, since you never got near enough to the enemy to use a sticker. Even back in the so-called First World War, women were beginning to show up in combat, especially among the Russians. By the Second World War they were in full swing. Literally millions of women used every type of weapon, once again especially among the Russians. There were women flying aces, women commanders of warships, women artillerists, and especially women infantry. And it wasn’t the Russians alone. The British discovered that the female anti-aircraft crews ran up at least as high scores as the male ones. You see, women have more patience, more stolidity. But possibly the real proof was seen in the Israeli-Arab wars. It was soon found that a 120 pound girl could buck a Brenn gun just as efficiently as a man, and was less apt to wind up with a galloping case of battle fatigue, if the fight went on too long, or if the shelling got a bit too heavy. Oh yes, women might make poorer warriors, but, believe me, husband dear, it has finally developed that they make better soldiers.”
She was evidently taking short cuts by going down less traffic ridden main arteries. For the moment, they were on an empty street.
Ronny growled, “I seem to be going from one lecture to another today. But at least, I think I’ve got something from this one.”
She looked at him from the side of her eyes, slowing down for a sharp turn. “Oh…?”
He snapped, “Yes.” His hand snaked out and switched the engine off. “The fact that man is admittedly better, hand to hand.”
She tried to whip her gun from its holster, but his hand was before hers. Open, it slammed the gun deeply down into the holster. And he kept his left hand over the weapon, even as he reached out with his right.
Her eyes wide, she began to shrill something, squirming to escape him.
Ronny chopped her expertly behind the ear, and didn’t even wait to watch her slump. He brought the vehicle to a bucking halt, awkward as he was with the controls in this position.
His eyes went quickly up and down the street. There were some pedestrians, more than a block away. And several hovercars in the distance. No one, seemingly, had seen the fray.
He heard a yell from above him, darted his eyes up. He had thought himself unobserved too soon. On the third floor of the building before which they had come to a stop, a man was leaning from, a window, shouting as though demented.
“Traitor,” Ronny muttered. He hurried out of the car and around to her side. He opened the door that she customarily vaulted, and dragged her forth. He carried her, noting, somewhat to his surprise, that she wasn’t nearly as heavy as he would have expected, and unsuspectedly soft in his arms. He set her down bodily against the wall of the building. The apartment occupant above continued to shout blue murder. Another head popped from another window, this time in a building across the way. A scream, sounding ludicrously feminine in this land of Amazons, reached for the skies.
He whipped the gun from Minythyia’s holster, stuck it in his belt, dashed back to the car, and slid into the seat she had forcibly been hauled from.
He banged the controls, for a moment ineffectually.
She had come awake. “Ronny!” she yelled at him. “Come back…!”
“Oh great,” he muttered sarcastically. He had the sporthover underway now, and realized why she had driven like a racing zealot. This souped-up vehicle took the bit in its teeth. He blasted down the street as though all demons were, after him.
“You don’t understand…!” her voice faded after him.
He grunted at that with sour humor. He didn’t understand was right, but he understood enough to keep away from that gang of hefty inquisitors, and those armed to the teeth bully-girls in the Hippolyte’s palace. This was one honeymoon Minythyia could count him out of.
He sped down the narrow way, took a quick right turn into the first street that appealed to him. Sped some more, and turned again. It would take a time, now, for them to find him.
However, he knew he was going to have to go to ground. He couldn’t indefinitely prowl the streets of Themiscyra in this sporthover and expect to keep away from the Hippolyte’s people forever. He had seen too many examples of Amazonian efficiency to doubt that once they set their nets it was just a matter of time until he was fished in.
But where could he go?
He had emerged into a broader avenue, one of the main arteries, and he slowed to keep attention from falling upon his speeding two seater. He hadn’t been on this particular boulevard before, but it checked out in impressive beauty with the others. Public buildings, libraries, he assumed, fountains, monuments, parks, plazas, theatres…
He was passing a theatre now. It was more or less of a replica of the Pantheon, Roman, rather than Greek.
